Attorneys couldn’t file documents and no one could retrieve documents.

by MEREDITH RUTLAND, MCCLATCHY NEWS SERVICE
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January 27, 2014

The U.S. federal court system’s websites went down from about 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. Friday, quietly shutting down access to court system information on the same day Internet users were focused on Gmail’s mid-day outage.

Websites down included the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals website, Jacksonville’s federal district and PACER, the public access website to federal court documents. That meant attorneys couldn’t file documents and no one could retrieve documents.

A PACER manager confirmed the severity of the outage, though apparently it affected only external users. He said it was the second PACER crash this week.

A Department of Justice spokesman didn’t immediately know the cause of the crash.

The crash came hours after Gmail and Google Plus went down for several hours Friday, rattling Internet users. A Google representative stated the company had resolved most of the issues with the crash but did not provide a cause in an email to the Times-Union.

There was no suggestion as of Friday evening that the website crashes were related.

One federal judge said she was able to get access to the site at her computer within the Orlando federal courthouse, but federal courthouses run on a different system.